


Thy Kingdom Come

by yuubaru



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Royalty, Guilty Pleasures, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-01
Updated: 2018-03-01
Packaged: 2019-03-25 11:09:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13832913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuubaru/pseuds/yuubaru
Summary: Sometimes fate is cruel in its deliverance. Some people are born princes; some, to become the captain of the guard; and others, mages who must struggle to bridge the gap between two kingdoms on the brink of war. Magic is the divisive key that will end all, or mend all.There's magic, but perhaps even more effective in turning the tides of war, is love.





	1. making a king

“I will tell him,” Hajime growled, as he and a group of heavily-armored men plodded down the castle corridors. Their skin was grimy and they stunk like blood, hardly an entourage fit to meet the Prince, but Hajime wouldn’t dare tell them as much. They were a group of knights back from the front lines of battle, and he knew to pay his respects.

“You must urge him to come to the front lines, Iwaizumi. We need him.” One of the knights, a young man with dark eyes and a crazed look about him, gripped his arm. He shook it free.

“Okay. I _will_ talk to him. Don’t follow me inside.”

Shortly, they came to a pair of large double-doors, dark and polished to a dull glow; fitting for the prince’s chambers. With knights flanking him on either side, Iwaizumi gripped the gilded handles and pulled them open.

Inside was a room that was entirely Tooru’s, glamorous in its simplicity. Hajime knew it because he had been here before, more times than he could ever tell anyone else. When they had nothing else to worry for, this room was like a sanctuary; where the two of them could be best friends, could be lovers, and neither of them had any responsibilities to answer to. Today, the air was heady with worries and there was nothing Hajime could say that would dispel them.

“Sire,” he started, closing the doors behind him so that he was alone with his prince, “I come with news from the border.”

Tooru was there, leaning idly against a table and plucking fresh fruit from a bowl. He spoke around his apple, perfectly-groomed brows arched high. His sing-song voice did not lighten Hajime's heart. His smile was too fond, he was too naive right now. How could Hajime ever say it?

“Hm? How do you know anything about the border-conflict, Iwa-chan? You were here half an hour ago, calling me names.”

Hajime didn’t reply. He frowned, and after a few tense moments, Tooru immediately schooled his expression into something steely. He placed the apple on the edge of the table, straightening.

“What is it?” Tooru asked a moment later, looking indifferent. His voice adopted an edge to it that was icy, and not at all the voice that Hajime knew when it was just the two of them under any other circumstances; the one filled with laughter, with light-hearted mockery.

Hajime knew that this was the facade Tooru adopted when he was being diplomatic, but the sight of it made his stomach tighten. He didn’t want to tell him here, like this.

“Tooru,” he said, voice rough, “Your father—”

He watched Tooru’s eyes become wide, watched him suck in a breath as he anticipated what was about to come. Like he was waiting to be doused in ice-water, every muscle taught and waiting. It stopped Hajime short, so that a beat later he had to force the words past his lips.

 

“The King is dead.”

 

* * *

 

 

The sound of strings— violins, the cello— accompanied Koushi through the palace entrance. White flowers hung in thick garlands around the arches that he passed under, each one manned by a guard dressed in royal blue. They tipped their heads at him as he passed, but he kept his eyes straight ahead, trained on a short flight of stairs that ascended to the throne room.

A pair of marble angels, their eyes cloudy and blind, waited for him on either side of the staircase, and he paused there beside the statuettes to suck in a deep breath. He could hear a crowd ahead, their mumbles joining together in a lively hum. They were members of the court, and every one of them, ladies in their flowing gowns and gentlemen in their long jackets, was anticipating his arrival. Koushi paused, steeling his nerves.

Before he could stall any longer, a pair of feet plodded down the staircase. When Koushi raised his eyes, the captain of his personal guard was watching him with a knowing half-smile.

“My prince,” he began, extending a hand, “Are you ready?”

“Oh, enough, Daichi.” Koushi took his hand as he chided him. His nerves made his breath come shortly, but he grinned in spite of himself.

Apparently it was infectious. Daichi’s smile grew, but he turned to lead him up the short staircase all the same. When they arrived at the top of it Daichi had long released his hand, and had fallen in stride somewhere behind him. He kept his head lowered demurely, but his eyes were straight ahead, and his expression sure. It was the picture-perfect image of a dutiful captain accompanying the prince into his very own coming-of-age ceremony. 

Koushi stopped just inside the large, open doors, and the room fell silent, every eager eye on him and waiting for his next move. He met his father’s eyes and nodded once. His father nodded in return from his place on the throne, and so Koushi stepped forth.

His father— the king—rose from his seat, commanding all the attention of the room at once.

“It is with great honor that I present my youngest son on this day,” His father’s voice was low and drawling, and possessed all the power of a respected ruler, “To join the crown family in stately matters, like his brother before him, and his father before him, and his father’s father. Today is the day that my youngest son, Prince Koushi, claims a stake in my estate, and a role of diplomacy that he has sworn to never abandon, and to never dishonor.” Members of the crowd looked up at him with adoration and respect, their eyes glittering with pride. This was their king, who had won the affection of every noble, from the central city, well into the rolling country-side. They hung on his every word like it would be his last.

Unlike the rest, Koushi watched his father mouth the words, unable to hear anything beyond the thick pounding of his blood. However, he knew this speech in his heart, could recite every word before his father had even drawn the breath to push it past his lips.

Next to his father stood his older brother. He wore a thick, white robe across his shoulders, and looked so uncannily like his father that Koushi almost laughed at them, standing side-by-side like they were. He was broader than his younger brother across the front, had a stronger set to his jaw, but the same ashen hair and dark eyes that Koushi did. Those dark eyes flicked sideways, drawing Koushi’s attention back to their king.

With a start, Koushi noticed him reaching for a thick, golden circlet, inlaid with sparkling jewels. He stepped forth, just below the throne, but he didn’t kneel as a knight would. No, he was finally old enough to accept his title; he was a prince, an ambassador, and he would never kneel again.

He lowered his ashen head, let his lashes fall closed as his father placed the circlet in his hair. When it was secure, he raised his eyes. Koushi let his entire stance change, let himself straighten and his lungs fill with new air. He looked out upon the small crowd, and he smiled.

 “I will uphold the honor of my father’s rule, the honorable rule of my brother after him, and I will give my blood for this kingdom. That is my word.”

Applause rang up in the crowd, and Koushi met his father’s eyes. The king smirked at him, and then gestured for the unassuming door just behind the set of thrones that seated his parents. His mother, almost the spitting image of Koushi himself, beamed with a brightness all her own.

He stepped past them and made for the door. He was met by another staircase, this one stone and one that Daichi took first so that he could open any doors in Koushi’s path. Typically it was a servant’s job, hardly a soldier’s and much less a captain’s, but it was Daichi’s own request to attend Koushi during his coming-of-age ceremony.

The two of them drew up to a balcony. Daichi threw open the doors to let the sunlight in, and immediately the roar of a much larger crowd filled the air. There were a thousand faces waiting in the courtyard below. Koushi walked to the railing of the balcony, placed his hand on the ornate stone so that he could look out at his kingdom, and laughed.


	2. far from home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> introducing the last of our main characters! this chapter was a bit longer than the first, but i didn't want to break them up. i decided, to celebrate finally posting this work, i would post two chapters at once.

The forest floor was flat and wide. Kenma ran, and the thunderous sound of horse-hooves behind him grew louder and louder by the second. Adrenaline kept his limbs moving with agility that didn’t feel like his own, and his long hair whipped into his eyes so that he could barely see where he was going. Still, he maintained a half-blind sprint, for fear of being caught-- and possibly killed.

His eyes darted this way and that, searching for something to hide him. Something that would save him.

A few hundred feet later, he finally found what he was looking for: a place where the brush became thicker, and the trees tangled together. He bolted for it.

It was hard to move once he was inside the thicket, and with no knife to help his cause, he opted for pushing through it with his hands. Thorns cut the skin on his palms and snagged the hem of his cloak, making his progress painfully slow. The sound of his pursuers was not far off, but the forest held him back.

He found some speed again when the tangle cleared, and just as he began to think that he had bought some time to escape with, the forest floor fell away, and he was falling.

 

Kenma landed hard on the narrow bank of a stream. It cut through the forest, so that the earth rose up as steep ledges on either side of it. For a few moments he was stunned; his entire world was the sound of running water, a thrumming in his head, and two earthy walls obscuring his vision. He coughed water from his lungs and grappled with the bank in an attempt to pull himself away from the water. His foot snagged something, and he twisted around to look at it.

There, in the water, was a pale man whose eyes were open and vacant; they looked up at the sky aimlessly. His body was stiff when Kenma jerked his foot from under his calf, and Kenma’s gasp came involuntarily. It had been so long since he’d seen a dead man that the sight made his stomach turn.

Frantic, Kenma flew against the earthy wall behind him and climbed downstream until he found a hiding place. Some roots had pulled the earth open and created a nook that he could hide an entire person inside, which would keep him hidden from any eyes peering downward into the stream.

From here, he could see the sprawl of corpses that got thicker as his eyes moved further toward the bend in the channel. They were soldiers, Kenma realized. A great many of them.

“He went this way!” It was far, but still too close for Kenma to rest. In a moment of quick thinking, he seized one of the corpses and pulled it close. After struggling with it for a moment, he stripped its jacket free and pushed his arms into the filched garment in practically the same instance.

Breathless, he shoved the body into his hiding place, and then clumped his hair together with mud from the stream, dragging the locks through his dirty fingers until they were as brown as the dirty river. His blond would be too noticeable, too easy to distinguish.

This was all a part of his plan. If he was lucky, and his pursuers were stupid, this would save his life.

With a grimace, he threw himself against one of the other corpses in the river, face down against its chest, and waited.

 

The smell of death and the pounding in his ears made the seconds tick by in the space of hours. He heard footsteps on the ridge above the stream, and willed his body to be still. He prayed to the gods that he looked like another fallen soldier, but if his pursuers were thorough men, he was sure to be found out. Kenma’s body was not a warrior’s; His shoulders were thin, and his frame was willowy. His hands were calloused, but not from swordplay. There wasn’t enough strength in his arms to hold a weapon that big very long.

Fear burned like a cold fire, in his chest.

After what felt like years, Kenma heard footsteps— just a single man’s—retreat down the ridge, and then out of earshot. The scout was gone.

 

Gradually, Kenma’s heartbeat began to slow. He allowed himself a deep, stuttering breath and instantly regretted it, as the stench of corpses filled his chest. The forest was quiet again, and the wind carried the sound of his pursuers further and further away. Now they sounded like the distant voices of a dream.

Just as Kenma began to feel the exhaustion set in and the peril of the last hour fade away, the dull _‘th-thmp’_ of a heartbeat made him go cold.

Cold, because it wasn't his own.

He reeled backwards and looked at the corpse splayed out below him with wide, searching eyes. It was a young man whose hair was untamed and dark. His coat was such a dark black that Kenma almost didn’t notice the stain of blood around his middle.

If his heart was beating, then of course he was alive. The thought—and really, the emotion that came with it— hit Kenma in waves.

What twist of fate brought him here, right on top of a dying man? What’s more, when he was running for his own life?

It took a great deal of effort and courage for him to examine the man a little closer. He crouched and set his hands to work, hoping— in a rather pessimistic way— that he was imagining things. That he wouldn’t find a dying man that he had no chance of saving.

He traced nimble fingers over the soldiers neck, checking for a pulse. Sure enough, a slow pounding met his fingertips, so he tried to roll him over, next. When he did, the stranger protested with a groan and jerked violently, startling him. Kenma’s hands flew away and then hovered, at a loss for what to do.

“Oh,” he said out loud, stunned by the fresh blood on them.

The idea that he could do anything to help this man was more of a fantasy than reality, and he knew that. After all, he wasn’t convinced that his own life was safe yet, and that the men following him wouldn’t loop back around to retrace their steps. With fresh blood on his hands, and the sheer amount of exhaustion and fear weighing on him, making him feel brittle and frail, the idea was daunting. However, he also knew that watching someone’s life extinguish before his eyes when he could have done something to prevent it would torment him for many long, quiet nights to come. Nights he would spend alone, no less.

Because, he had no one left. Just like this stranger, a single, young soldier left in the wake of a massacre, he was alone.

Heaving a huge sigh (that sounded uncannily like a sob), Kenma rolled up the sleeves of his cotton shirt, and tugged the strip of leather around his wrist free, to bind his hair back with. Without a word, he got to work.

 

* * *

 

 For Kuroo, the next few days were snatches a fever dream. It was a lucid kind of consciousness, one that came and went, and his fever was so high that when he was awake, his surroundings didn’t make sense to him. One moment he was dreaming, ankle-deep in the mud, exchanging blows with his enemies at the bottom of a river-bed. The next, it was pitch-black, it was silent, and his skin was on fire.

Tortuously, each time he slept his dreams brought him closer and closer to the moment that a glancing blow to his mid-section knocked him unconscious. The pain that accompanied the wound was white-hot ball of fire in his side, and he thought it would kill him.

Certainly, it would kill him.

As he gazed up through his dreams at a line of enemy soldiers on the ridge above the stream, as he watched his friends being gutted in his peripherals, a strange, soothing sensation washed over him and like he thought he never would again, he opened his eyes.

 

Kuroo’s fever broke with a gasp. He sat up, heart still hammering, and almost collided with someone sitting above him. They flinched backwards, and Kuroo tried to focus his eyes in the dark.

“Who are you?” He demanded, half-dazed. His skin was slick with sweat, and the clothes he was wearing were soaked-through. The person above him was a stranger he quickly realized, but all he could see of him was a pair of wide, cat-like eyes.

He pushed his hand down against Kuroo’s chest, forcing him back against the earth. There was no strength in the gesture, but Kuroo had even less strength left to fight back with. His breath left him with a huff.

“Where am I?” He tried again, wincing. That now-familiar, soothing sensation radiated out from the center of his chest where the stranger’s hand was, and it calmed him. Kuroo’s voice came out softer this time, but not without an edge to it. “Who—”

“It’s okay,” the boy above him interrupted, keeping his voice low. “Calm down.”

With no strength left to argue, Kuroo looked around, trying to gather his bearings. The two of them were sitting close together inside of an earthy hollow, or... a burrow of some kind. It had been haphazardly made into a shelter, with branches thrown over the entrance to hide them, and there was hardly enough room to fit the two of them inside of it. The other boy was pinned back against the dirt, beside him.

For a long time, neither of them said anything. Kuroo realized he hadn’t yet taken his hand off of his chest, and tried to gently push him away. His company understood before their hands could even touch, and as soon as the contact between them broke, the soothing warmth that had been rolling across his skin vanished. It stole some of Kuroo’s breath when it left him.

Dazed and honestly a little confused, he began to think of questions to ask that might explain their situation a little better. Before he could say a thing, the other boy spoke.

"Do you think you can move?"

"What?

“Someone followed me here, and they might come back. I don’t know what they’ll do if they find us.” He didn’t mince his words, that was for certain.

“Maybe.” That raised about a hundred more questions, but Kuroo sat up. His body felt heavy, and pain flared out around his middle. He decided that he wouldn’t be running any marathons any time soon, but he could probably walk.

“Yeah. I can move,” he answered again a beat later.

 

Without wasting a moment, the boy crawled out around Kuroo and pushed his head through the makeshift entrance. After a few long moments, he reached a hand toward him.

It was a small hand to accompany a weak grip. Kuroo doubted that he could even help him to his feet—or knees, considering that they were crouched in a burrow— but he took his hand anyway, and hoisted himself forward with a great deal of effort.

 

The forest was quiet that night, and Kuroo’s eyes adjusted to the dark quickly. The other boy had relinquished his hand, and was leading Kuroo downstream. Their feet waded through the water noisily, and he recalled what he had been told a few moments earlier: _‘Someone followed me here. If they find us, I think we’ll be in trouble.’_

A creeping sense of fear prickled down the back of his neck, and he realized that he no longer had his knife stowed in the leather holster on his side. While he was looking for it, his palms passed over a thick cotton gauze that had been wrapped around his middle. His eyes flitted to the small, shadowy figure in front of him.

He didn’t have a reason to trust him, except that he hadn’t killed Kuroo _yet_. He didn’t actually even know if this was the person who had bandaged his wounds, or if he was the person who stole his knife, leaving him defenseless. But while he was injured, he didn’t have any ground to stand on in a fight. So, he decided to follow him obediently, keeping quiet.

He didn’t think his company would ever speak again, but sure enough, words did come. In the form of a question.

“Where is your home?”

It almost made Kuroo scoff, the simplicity of it.

"Far from here."

"In this direction?"

“Uh, give me a break. Since I woke up, I’m not even entirely sure which way is up, and which way is down.”

Here, the other boy turned on him. In the moonlight, Kuroo could see those cat-like eyes a little better. They flickered with impatience, brightly.

“We’ll camp soon. Tomorrow, when you’re rested, tell me where to take you.”

“Sure.” A beat, and then he leaned forward, trying to see his savior’s face a little better. The other boy leaned back, trying to avoid closeness.

“What’s your name?” Kuroo heard himself ask, next.

His reply came with great reluctance.

"It's Kenma."

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! I haven't updated in a long while, but lo and behold, I'm still pumping out Haikyuu!! AUs. This one has been in the works for a while now, and I'm already about halfway done with it. However, updates will come in installments, to give myself time to finish! This entire work is a guilty pleasure of mine. Magic, princes who fall in love with the wrong people, and everything else I like. 
> 
> To those of you following my other works (the few): I more than likely won't update those, in favor of writing this one. Maybe one day I'll get back to them, but I have other stories that interest me more. (One that I'm writing is about ghosts!)


End file.
